MW adding North Dakota State ‘too good an opportunity to pass’

North Dakota State’s move to the Mountain West was both years in the making and days in the making.

It took the Bison nearly two decades to build the kind of résumé required to be an attractive add for an FBS conference. But getting that offer from the Mountain West is something that wasn’t much of a thought even a couple of weeks ago.

“It happened super fast,” Nevada athletic director Stephanie Rempe said. “So, I don’t know when the initial call was, but maybe a week ago we first started having talks. Maybe 10 days ago we started having the first conversation about it. And then you have to get the presidents involved and then they have to negotiate the terms and then it happened. We’re super excited.”

Count Nevada among the schools who were in favor of adding the FCS powerhouse to the MW as a football-only affiliate, which was officially announced Monday by the league after reports of mutual interest broke over the weekend. The Bison have won 10 of the last 15 FCS national titles and will make the jump to college football’s top division in 2026 in search of a new challenge.

North Dakota State will reportedly pay a $12.5 million entrance fee to the MW on top of the $5 million transition fee owed the NCAA. The Bison are not expected to dip into the MW’s media-rights money the league announced last week, a six-year pact with CBS and Fox and five-year deal with The CW. North Dakota State should boost the MW’s football profile while providing a financial win for the league.

“As the discussions continued, it was almost like it was too good of an opportunity to pass up,” Rempe said. “And so then it was, ‘Do they make us better? And is it financially beneficial to us? And is a doable?’ And I feel like we checked each of those boxes. It is financially beneficial for the league. It helps elevate our football programs. And we can make it work. We can figure it out. And so that’s why everybody signed on and agreed to do it.”

Rempe said thought was given to waiting until 2027 to add North Dakota State, but the move will instead happen this fall. That will require a recalibrated conference schedule after home and road games were announced last month. The MW will stick with an eight-game league schedule, at least for this season. It could go to nine league games in 2027. For now, each league member will play eight of the nine other opponents in the league, which also added UTEP as a full member and Northern Illinois as a football-only affiliate to backfill after losing five schools to the Pac-12.

North Dakota State was initially bypassed when the MW had to look for more schools to fill the void left by the Pac-12 departures. The conference stuck with schools already in the FBS to avoid any issues in hitting the required eight football members to be an FBS conference. After gaining that stability the announcing its new television deal, the MW went back to market for the best the FCS has to offer.

“I think as the dust settles you start to evaluate what’s best for the league,” Rempe said. “And I think that’s probably why we came up with that, with the fact that we’re comfortable with an FCS coming on board. I think there was some concern early on with the CFP and that structure and where the Group of 6 fits in that. And so I think it maybe wasn’t really something we wanted to risk. And now I think the dust is settled and everybody’s excited for the best teams that we could possibly get.”

Rempe said she consulted Nevada football coach Jeff Choate over the last week, with Choate having success in the FCS at Montana State where his team lost to North Dakota State in the 2018 and 2019 playoffs, with both games in the Bison’s famed Fargodome.

“The very first time I asked him, he was fired up,” Rempe said. “Yeah, he thinks it’s going to be great. He knows how good they are, and he’s excited to have them in the league. He feels like it will help everybody.”

With its long-term television contract announced, the MW has media-rights and membership stability through 2032. The league has navigated some rocky moments over the last 28 months but can now look forward with more strategic planning after being in survival mode after losing Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State, Fresno State and Utah State to the Pac-12 in September 2023.

“It’s fascinating to watch the landscape, and we could not be more confident in who we are and where we’re going and the schools in the league,” Rempe said. “It’s really a remarkable job by our conference office and our presidents to get us to the point where we are now. I think we used the right people and the right resources to get to where we are today in terms of negotiating our television options, in terms of working through all of the challenges that are still out there with the schools that left and then the remaining Pac-2. And then figuring out who we’re gonna bring in, what are the best schools to bring in, what are the financial implications? And now we have our television deal that’s out there that’s been done for a while.

“We’re excited about where we are. We feel confident. I think we’re going to really band together and get excited about what we can do and continue to invest across the board and then see what the future holds.”

The MW now has eight full-time members that play football, two non-football full members and two football-only affiliates. Rempe doesn’t not anticipate the MW adding more football schools, admitting she would have said that three weeks ago as well before discussions with North Dakota State perked up. While the membership is not as clean cut as the current MW alignment, Rempe said the moves, which included adding Utah Tech in baseball, were necessary at the time.

“You have to do what’s right for your league,” Rempe said. “And so each one of those, it’s not like you can look at it all from the same perspective. Each one of these as we worked through them was unique in its own way. The men’s soccer, the baseball affiliates, those were very specific situations that we needed to address. And you look at what is happening in the landscape of all of the leagues and what options those schools have and what it does for us to make sure we have an automatic qualification, there’s a lot of different pieces to that. And, of course, you want a clean X number of sports, X number championships, everybody’s in the league. But even when the Pac-12 was in its prime, it still had affiliates because it had schools that have sports that aren’t sponsored by the Pac-12. So, it’s not uncommon. But each one is looked at very specifically based on all of the pieces of information that you have for that sport.”

The final piece to the MW’s rebuild, at least for now, is adding a North Dakota State football program that is 192-22 since 2011, winning just shy of 90 percent of its games over the last 15 seasons.

“You want great competition,” Rempe said. “You want to compete. You want to go up against the best competition you can go up against. What most excites me is probably just the impact they’ll have on our on football profile. A rising tide lifts all boats, and they’re a strong school that’ll come in and elevate our football league.”